Like some monster in a horror movie who is defeated only to return for the sequel, I am back! And I’m back in the Omegathon. Also, I saw this rad card game, I played some sealed Riftbound, and I helped run the Pokecrawl!
Woo. Very busy day. Let’s start at the top shall we?
My morning was dominated by two things: Getting the most I could out of media hour on the show floor, only to be followed by competing in round one of the Omegathon. For media hour, I mostly bumped around the show, and chatted with a few folks, and I want to call out two things.
First up, Brother Ming is out demoing Re;MATCH! It’s got a Kickstarter1running right now. Longest time readers will know that I have been waiting for this game since 2020, and that it has been a long and interesting road to get here, but I’m thrilled that it’s gonna be a real thing I can own.
The first big discovery of PAX East, though, the first exciting new thing, is Eidol.
It is Path of Exile’s crafting meets a card game. It is fascinating, it is ambitious, and I am so deeply hopeful that it works out. I recognize that I’m asking you to put your trust in me and join a Discord for a game that doesn’t exist yet. Even the Discord server is a bit sparse, but trust me: this thing has stupid amounts of potential, and if I could have you play this demo, I would.
And as a final brief aside: Orna has a booth! I wrote about Orna almost 4 years, but since then the game has evolved immensely. I’ve been told the game now has a queuing feature where you can “collect” encounters, check ins, and events, and then play them all at once later, solving my primary issue with the game: trying not get hit by a bus while playing classic RPG combat is actually kinda difficult, so I may have to give it another try.
Which brings up our next topic of interest: Round 1 of the Omegathon.
Okay. So.
It was Rocket League. I am quite bad at Rocket League, but in what is becoming a running bit, I was carried by my awesome teammate Dizzybelle. I would also like to note that unlike last year, I did practice rocket league. I played like 10 hours! I’m just very bad at Rocket League.
Witness the faces of the returning “were very close to being champions”.
Anyway, after that I grabbed some lunch, and did a little meandering before sitting down for my second competition of the day: a sealed Riftbound event.
I haven’t played anywhere near enough Riftbound to have a good set of thoughts about it yet, but what I’ve played so far has been interesting, and I generally like it. I didn’t do incredibly, winning round 1, before getting cleaned out in round 2 by a much more experienced player who was kind enough to help me fix my deck after.
I find Riftbound much more challenging than many of the card games I’ve gotten into recently, as there are a lot more play lines than I’m used to considering, even compared to Magic.
Anyway, I had to drop from that early to get over to help run the Pokecrawl! I’ve done this about 3 times now, it’s always a fun event, and it’s even more fun to help run!
And now I am back home. And I am tired. This reads a bit more like a journal entry than it does a full writeup, but unpacking a million cards is all I have energy for now, so I’ll end it here, and I’ll be heading back to the show tomorrow!
P.S: If you’d like to try out the newest Card City Critters puzzle, keep an eye out for me around the show! I’ll be wearing the same goofy green sweatshirt, and possibly a ditto bucket hat!
Quick disclosures and whatnot: I’m a Kickstarter backer for the this. Do your own research before deciding to back Kickstarter projects, because my risk tolerance may not match yours. Okay, back to normal writing.↩︎
pls pls pls pls let this proclamation age well. ↩︎
Edit 3/27/2026: Quick preface: I think Once Upon a Galaxy is a good game, and you should play it. It’s cool. I don’t intend to change my actual writeup, but uh, rereading this today, I think it comes across a little less enthusiastic about the game and slightly more caustic than I actually feel.
We all remember Storybook Brawl, right? It was a cool card based auto-battler with a fairy tale theme by way of Shrek meets Grim. In 2022 it sold to a scrappy little company called FTX, and in 2023 it was shut down when everyone involved in FTX was being prosecuted for 16 billion dollars in fraud.
As far as I can tell, at least some of the people in Good Luck Games went on to make Once Upon a Galaxy. It’s a cool little card-based auto-battler with a fairy tale theme by way of pop culture references meet Grimm.
Write what you know I guess.
Making a game, getting it popular, selling it to a Crypto company1, then making a new company to make a new game that is pretty much just a better copy of your old game is a bold strategy. It seems to have mostly worked out for Matthew Place and the team at Million Dream Games, presumably because everyone who might be upset about them doing this is currently in prison2.
But I’m not here to recount the one time in the last 20 years that financial criminals were held even remotely responsible for their actions. I’m here to talk about Once Upon a Galaxy.
I’m gonna be honest, I feel like I should put an in-depth explanation of the game’s mechanics here, but I’d just be rewriting paragraphs 3 through 5 of my Storybook Brawl write up, so just go read those real quick. We can pretend I put them here.
It’s actually a little tricky to find good images of Once Upon a Galaxy, because the combat screen and shop screen look pretty much the same to anyone who hasn’t played the game. Anyway, please appreciate my 23k Snapping Hydra.
There’s a lot of things in Once Upon a Galaxy that were copied over from Storybook Brawl. The core conceit is pretty much the same: pick a captain3/leader card, build a team of units, have them fight each other, and stay alive the longest to win. But there’s also a lot of fat trimming going on here—places where Once Upon a Galaxy looks at Storybook Brawl and goes “No, I don’t think we need that.”
Most notable is probably board size and reserve. Storybook Brawl had 7 combat slots, and 3 reserve slots. Once Upon a Galaxy has 5 slots. There’s no gold to manage for buying units either. Instead, every shop is just a 4-pick-1 rogue-lite style set of choices.
Of course, there’s also a fair amount of stuff I haven’t seen before, or things that are tweaks from existing mechanics. Treasures existed in Storybook Brawl, but they were limited to a max of 3 per player, requiring you to throw one away when you got your fourth. In Once Upon a Galaxy, they are no longer locked down in that way, opening up a whole bunch of interesting space, such as dragons that care about creating them, and get buffs based on the number, to characters that manipulate the stat buffs they grant.
I could probably write multiple paragraphs about Candy, a cross card type mechanic that influences a global “Sweetness” value, and is used as both a modifier of spells and card abilities. It’s also a good example of how the game creates glue for its archetypes, with various candy cards adding the Candy type to non-candy cards, allowing them to be slotted into an archetype they otherwise might fall out of.
Generally speaking, the game feels fun to play even if a few strategies feel over represented, or good across multiple captains.
This was supposed to be an image of an Animals comp, but then I got this CRAZY Paul Bunyan/Echoing Fae synergy combo off, and I had to see what happened, and then I realized I needed to stop playing if I wanted to actually finish this article.
Probably the biggest mechanic (or the one I will attempt steal at some point) is slot buffs, where buffs can be applied to a slot, and not the characters in the slot, so that you can replace them without losing the picks spent on those buffs. And of course, some characters interact in a cool way with those buffs!
One of the genre’s core mechanics has also been adjusted in a pretty clever way. Most auto-battlers have a mechanic where drafting multiple copies of the same unit powers that unit up, usually three copies. This could put you in a difficult place if you got the first two, but never found a third. Once Upon a Galaxy, banishes this, instead making each copy after the first a promotion, first to silver, then gold. Picking a silver unit gives an extra shop, and picking a gold unit gives a treasure.
There are some things that are just copied, like the Slay4 keyword, which has been renamed to Hunt. I’m okay with that. I think it’s fine to copy your own mechanics.
Then there’s the things they copied that I wish they didn’t.
I have a limited number of complaints about Once Upon a Galaxy. Many of them are small-to-medium sized annoyances, like how some Captains have a single line of voice acting, and others don’t.
The game’s UI is clunky5, and signing in to make an account has been the biggest stumbling block to actually playing. Every time I press the launch button, there’s a 2/3 chance that Steam doesn’t actually launch the app. I’ve gotten a few bugs where the games just kinda… crashes out a bit, and shows me a card named “404 Shop Not Found.”
But none of these quite compare with the monetization.
The monetization is “hmm.” I dunno even know that it’s bad, in a traditional way? I am a sucker for garbage6. Despite the fact that I’ve played 15+ hours of Once Upon a Galaxy in three days, I’m uninspired to buy anything it. Partly because it feels like a bit of a bad deal, with characters/decks running for about five to six bucks each. Partly because it feels a bit pay to win.
It just feels kind of off.
Most of these are small things. The monetization isn’t even egregious. There’s no gacha, and the battlepass is easy to farm, so while there is some FOMO, there’s no limited daily progression. Still, I wish it was a bit better.
I generally like Once Upon a Galaxy. It gives me the play experience that other people get from Balatro, that of just sinking into a small math puzzle of upgrades, builds, strategies and signposts.
I do think there’s a bunch of cool stuff here as well. They’ve trimmed out a bunch of vestigial stuff that auto-battlers traditionally have like gold and level management. There are neat new mechanics.
So yeah. Go play it before it turns out Million Dreams Games hasn’t figured out how to monetize the genre yet, and they have to sell themselves to an AI company, then remake this game a third time.
Also, if two of you use my pyramid schemereferral link here7, I can get 500 more gems total.
Or maybe not? Sure, Sam is still in prison, but some of these people only got 2 years. They say crime doesn’t pay, but apparently it does if you’re white collar enough about it. ↩︎
Captains grant some sort of permanent build around passive or trigger-able ability.↩︎
Slay/Hunt is a trigger-able keyword that occurs whenever the unit attacks and kills another unit. The important bit here is “Attacks.” If a unit with slay is attacked, and kills the other unit on the defense, that doesn’t trigger the keyword. Using slay effectively means either gambling that your unit will get the first attack, or buffing it high enough to be able to take a hit, and smash back.↩︎
One friend who I showed this game to immediately stopped playing after 10 minutes because of how aggravating he found the on-boarding and UI. Knowing it was his sort of game, I persuaded him to give it one more shot.
He proceeded to play for literally 12 hours in a row. I went to bed, woke back up, and he was still playing. The game is that good, and the UI is that bad. ↩︎
I spent $50 on an arcade version of Minecraft Dungeons yesterday, because it spat out collectible trading cards. The bright side to being an unemployed miser is that I now have a lot more free time to spend the money I spent the last 10 years shoving into a pile.↩︎
This is the only referral link in the article. All the other links are normal ones, and will just link to the Steam page. Figured I’d just put that disclosure out there. ↩︎
I went to a Pokemon Perfect Order prerelease this weekend. Could I have spent that time doing a Pokopia or Slay the Spire 2 writeup? Yes. Did I? No. Still, Pokemon is a bit weird as far as prereleases go, so I figured it would be interesting to go over what makes it different from so many other card games that have sealed events.
Almost all sealed events for TCGs are pretty much the same. You get a bunch of booster packs, you crack em open, and you build a deck with what you get. Then you play a bunch of games. Based on the game, some rules are probably adjusted or tweaked, but the general idea remains the same across Magic, Lorcana, and One Piece.
Today I’m mostly looking at those specific tweaks.
Magic sets are designed around these limited formats to a large extent, so all Magic needs to do is drop minimum deck size from 60 to 40, and the format works. Lorcana, on the other hand, normally has additional deck building restrictions based on the color of cards. It just removes those color restrictions, and drops max deck size. One Piece pulls a similar trick, dropping deck size down, and giving all players a special leader that counts as all colors and all leader types/names.
Pokemon though… well, Pokemon is in a bit of a tricky spot here for multiple reasons, so Pokemon has to make a lot of changes. Some of these changes are similar to the ones above, such as dropping the deck size from 60 to 40. Some are made to speed the game up, like dropping the number prize cards required to win from 6 prize cards to 4 cards.
And then there’s the big one. Yesterday’s prerelease came with what was effectively a 40 card full precon deck.
Something like this has always been the case for Pokemon prereleases, as long as I’ve been playing as an adult1. The exact form factor has changed over the years,2 but the general idea has remained the same: give players something resembling a starting a deck, instead of requiring that they build something out of their booster packs.
The question I think a lot of people have here is “Why do this?” and that’s what I’m going to answer.
The Reasons
There are two sets of reasons that Pokemon does this. The first is mechanical, and the second is for their playerbase. Mechanical reasons are to make the Pokemon TCG actually work for limited environment. Playerbase reasons are to make the prerelease product appealing to their players3.
Let’s start with the mechanical reasons. First up, typing. Pokemon’s primary resource system is an inverted version of Magic: The Gathering’s land system: putting cards into play is free, but using their attacks and abilities requires placing energy onto them. Except where Magic has 5 basic land types, Pokemon has 9. This means you’re going to have a very hard time building a basic deck out of a set of boosters, perhaps even more so than any other TCG.
Next up is evolution. Evolution is another core game mechanic where strong cards require that they be placed on top of weaker cards into order to put them into play4. If you are opening random booster packs, there is a no guarantee that you will get a complete line, and there is no easy way to cheat the system.
As a result while you can make a deck that can be “played” from cracking a few boosters, and grabbing some energy, it is not going to be a fun deck. It’s going to be a grindy slogfest where whoever can set up something even moderately powerful is going to win.
So mechanically, it makes a lot of sense to give players something to build around, as it puts everyone on a somewhat even power level, means that no one has to go and make a 4 color deck, and allows people to splash things up a little.
Except while that’s what Pokemon used to do, these days they straight up give everyone a 40 card deck. So why do they do that as opposed to giving them only a few cards to build around?
I think it’s because Pokemon understands its actual player base, and a very important part of that playerbase is children5. And while I’ve seen children playing almost every card game, they’re almost always the children of adults who are also attending the event, or at least play with their kids at home.
This is not the case for Pokemon. Many Pokemon events will have parents who attend to watch their kids, but don’t know how to play the game themselves, and don’t intend to learn.
Children are still learning, and asking a 6 to 12 year old to read 60+ cards, understand them, come up with a strategy, and build a deck with them in 30 minutes is a lot. Even giving them part of a deck can still be asking a lot of them.
Giving them a prebuilt deck that they can upgrade? Now that’s a lot more reasonable.
The end result of all of this is that Pokemon prereleases are a bit more of a precon tournament then a sealed event these days. This does not bother me much, if for no other reason than that prerelease events are my only opportunity to play much Pokemon these days6.
Anyway, that’s why Pokemon is different. Hopefully you learned something. I’m now going back to looking at job boards, and repeatedly rewriting my resume for each one until it makes the AI happy.
Previously, prerelease kits had a foil stamped card, maybe 2-3 copies of a specific evolution line, and a few trainers, but not energy cards or anything that was ready to be a full deck. At least some deckbuilding was required to turn this small package into something you could play. Magic players might be familiar with the special themed sixth pack that came with Avatar: The Last Airbender sets. Pokemon used to be a bit like that.↩︎
I think whoever designs the Pokemon TCG play experience actually knows its playerbase MUCH better than games like Lorcana, and seems to care about them more than Magic. ↩︎
If you have ever wondered where I stole Card City Critters’ evolution mechanic from: this. This is where. ↩︎
The primary requirement for being a Level 1 judge in Pokemon is not being knowledgeable about the TCG. It’s passing a background check to make sure you can safely be around children. In addition, Pokemon is the only card game that separates players based on age. This is a good thing. I don’t feel good beating 12 year olds at card games and I feel even worse losing to them. ↩︎
Yesterday’s prerelease kit was $30, and everyone got 3 booster packs at the end for completing all three rounds. Buying the content of that off eBay right now would run me something like $80-90 USD.↩︎
Ed Note: I wrote most of this back on Feb 27th, then got busy with a few things, and didn’t finish it until today.
Another Magic set, another prerelease. There seem to be a lot of those these days, don’t they? And apparently we have Secrets of Strixhaven in like 6 weeks? Jesus Christ.
Anyway, Teengage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’ll be doing a little bit of UB ranting as I do this, but I mostly write these after-action reports for myself, and so other folks can take a look at my pool and prepare themselves for limited events, so let’s pull that pool up.
Apologies for the slightly scuffed image; the missing cards are two copies of Anchovy and Banana Pizza (sorcery speed artifact that kills) and Krang and Shredder (late game bomb).
As a side note: only 5 people showed up for this release. This meant that each round, someone got a bye, which was a bit disappointing. At the same store, Lorwyn sold out.
Deckbuilding
I am deeply ambivalent about this deck. On the one hand, all of my strong bombs were black, I had 4 pieces of removal in black, and I had a reasonable amount of decent white stuff. Plus I had Quintessential Katana, which did a ridiculous amount of work.
On the other hand, post release I sat down and realized I had some pretty good red stuff. And as we’ll see, it’s not like the deck I made performed great, so it’s hard to feel like I really made the best choices here.
In any case, this was a set where I didn’t get a chance to test dummy pools, and I did less prep than I probably needed to. It will be borne out in the results.
So lets talk about the matches!
Matches
Match 1 was against Red/Blue artifacts. This got off to a good start, when I manged to take a fairly decisive game 1. Perhaps a bit too decisive, as I was confident going into game 2, and not as worried as I should have been when I lost.
And then there was game 3. Oh, game 3. Game three was a mess. I made several critical misplays, most notably where I whiffed a Make Your Move on a Ray Fillet, Man Ray that my opponent removed a +1/+1 from, causing both the spell to fizzle, and them to grab an extra card. This was compounded when they dropped a Donatello Mutant Mechanic that was I completely unable to remove.
End result was a board state where I was chunked down by artifact creatures until I died.
Game 2 was another match against… Red/Blue artifacts! This time I managed to win, but I’ll be honest, I don’t remember exactly what happened, and I didn’t keep great notes for this one. I do remember that I managed to play Armaggon, Future Shark to wipe their board.
Game 3 was… a bye. Yeah, remember when I said that we had a total of 5 people show up for this prerelease? This was the result. A 2-1 record, that really was more of a 1-1.
Overall Thoughts
I’m obviously unhappy with my performance in this pre-release. A 2-1 record isn’t great, I made a bunch of avoidable misplays that potentially cost me games, and then I got a bye so I didn’t even play a third match. I usually like byes, but only when I’m already winning and I get a break.
I’m also really unhappy with how TMNT plays in Sealed. I’m pretty sure I used the set mechanics less than I played games. Disappear and Sneak are cool in theory, but I had none of the core support cards like Dream Beavers to enable them. The end result was a very bland experience, one where I spent most of my time just playing a very dull game of Magic.
There’s a temptation to paint all of Universes Beyond with a broad brush, and while the product as a whole likely comes from a CFO’s desire to Scooge McDuck into a vault of money, the individual sets have been varied in quality. I’ve really enjoyed Avatar, Lord of the Rings, and Final Fantasy.
TMNT was not like those sets for me. It was a fairly mediocre experience.
Post Script: This is going up a bit later than I had intended, but since release I’ve done a few drafts, and… yeah, draft is better, but I still can’t say I love the set.
This set has convinced me that I’m probably good to skip most of the Universes Beyond sets for the rest of the year. There’s too many of them, and I’m just not interested in playing them in paper. If they’re actually good, I’ll just draft them. But I’m tired of pre-releases every 5 minutes for sub-par turnout.
Non-Clickbait Title: Ravensburger has shot itself in the foot repeatedly, and it killed my local Lorcana scene.
Okay, so that’s a little bit of a lie. My local game store (LGS) did cancel their weekly Lorcana events, but as far as I’m aware, the game isn’t dead. Yet. But the local population of players has cratered.
I like looking at weird things that happen in TCG’s, and Lorcana has recently given me an interesting little case study in players at my LGS, and how/when the drop-off happened.
I also think that for the specific population of players I played with, I can trace back the decline to two or three fairly specific events, and that interests me! So let’s talk about it.
But first…
Why does it matter that weeklies are cancelled?
The store I went to for Lorcana ran casual weekly events. These were non-prized, non-competitive freeplay events. You bought in for $7, got a booster pack of your choice, and were entered in a raffle to win some other organized play prizes.
These events were the lowest possible entry point to get into Lorcana and connect with the local community. If you are brand new to the game, if you’ve never played a card game before, if you didn’t go out to card game events… this was the easiest way to try out the game in the lowest stakes, most chill energy environment available.
Without these events, the first rung on a ladder of getting into the game has been removed. It won’t stop weirdos like me who show up to sealed events for games they can’t play, but I do think it makes it much more daunting (and expensive!) for almost everyone else.
I think this is bad, but I think its especially bad for Lorcana. A lot of Lorcana players in our local were Disney fans first, and Lorcana players second. The traditional label for this would probably be “casual” players, but I don’t think that fits here. These were folks who came to every pre-release and bought cards by the booster box. They might have played the game casually, but they didn’t engage with it casually. They were more interested in making decks around their favorite characters than trying to break the meta.
Anyway, that’s a lot text to say:
Loss of weeklies was bad because it removed the first step in on-boarding for new players or players who wanted to get more involved.
It’s especially bad for Lorcana because it removed the environment where a lot of players could play the sorts of decks they liked to make.
Cause #1 – Weekly Challenges
Prior to Lorcana’s set 9 (Fabled) release, Lorcana weeklies had a point a system. Each week, you could show up, earn points for doing a variety of different things, and at the end of the season, the folks with the most points got some special prizes.
I don’t want to focus on the prizes here, but I do want to look at the challenges. Some of them notably rewarded playing weird decks. So instead of everyone just showing up with their best deck each week, there was an incentive to build out a deck to try to meet that weeks challenges, or to play a multiplayer game.
In short: there was a reason to keep things fresh.
(And as a side effect, probably lower the power level of the decks of the players who really wanted to earn points.)
When Ravensburger got rid of this, it removed both the incentive to show up every week, since prizes were now just raffles at the end, and it also meant that there was no reason to even try to make a new deck every week. Meaning that on a week to week basis, every week started to feel the same.
Cause #1.5 – Prize Adjustments
I debated giving this a full sub-section, but I think its comparatively minor. A bit after the weekly scoresheet changes, Ravensburger swapped out their prizes. Previously, I think there had been things like playmats, pins, and cards. Right now, there are only cards and these really underwhelming card boxes.
How underwhelming? Underwhelming enough that I, the king of taking free stuff, the supreme sovereign of snatching up game-adjacent garbage, paused before accepting one of these things. I mean, I still took it. But I was unenthused.
I don’t think that this on its own really did too much damage to Lorcana, but I do know that for specific players, this was highly demotivating. It wasn’t a bomb, but it was a surgical removal of another incentive for that set of player to show up and play.
Cause #2 – Set Rotation
Different games have different terms for the idea of set rotation, but all of them loosely follow the same idea: at some point in the lifespan of a TCG, older sets of cards removed from the standard play pool in order to make room for new sets of cards. It can be viewed as a necessity in order to prevent the game from becoming stale, or a way to get people to buy new cards.
Regardless, virtually every card game does it, and Lorcana was no exception; they called it Core Constructed. And after their rotation, Lorcana required that decks at these weekly casual events be in the Core Constructed format.
I think this was a terrible idea.
I do think that Lorcana needed rotation from a mechanical standpoint. Set 1, while not committing any of the flaws of say, Alpha Magic, or base set Pokemon, has some flawed designs.
Honestly, on the grand scale of “Well that was a mistake,” a free Wheel of Fortune still ranks lower than “What if land destruction was free?” or “What if you could take turn 5 on turn 1?”
So yeah. Rotation made sense from a competitive standpoint, and a design standpoint.
But I don’t think it made sense for the large subset of the player base who were Disney fans first, and Lorcana fans second. There were a fair number of adults and kids who could no longer play their favorite deck because those cards weren’t reprinted in Fabled, and so… they stopped showing up for weekly casuals.
Synthesis
So when my LGS held their final casual Lorcana event, I was the only person who showed up. I sat around for a bit, did some drawing, then went food shopping while the rest of the store was full of folks playing Riftbound.
The removal of weekly challenges and prizes disincentivized entrenched players from showing up to play, while also making the ones who did show up bring the same deck week after week. Set rotation killed off a lot of casual decks that didn’t need to be killed off, while making folks who’d never played a card game before feel a bit cheated, and question their investment of time, money, and energy in the game.
So here’s my guess as to what happens next:
The lack of casual play will remove a critical part of the playerbase pipeline. The events that are still supported will have lower and lower turnout, as it becomes less and less interesting to play with smaller numbers of people.
End result? No more Lorcana at the local game store.
Conclusion
Okay, so I know I called that part above this synthesis, but I think there’s a much more interesting takeaway here: Ravensburger doesn’t understand their playerbase, and treated them like they would Magic: The Gathering players.
To be fair, I would have made the exact same mistake if I was in their position. No one has to put me in charge of a possible multi-million dollar TCG yet, based off a brand worth billions of dollars, but still.
There’s an assumption that the final form of the “hardcore” player of a CCG/TCG is out grinding tournaments, tracking their full collection, building copies of and iterating on meta decks, and just generally fully engaging with the game portion of the collectible card experience. I think in the case of Lorcana, some of the meat and potato grinders weren’t doing that. They were collecting, they were buying tons of cards, and they were making fun weekly decks for character they liked.
These were the ‘hardcore’ players. They attended every prerelease, they had built decks for store championships, they tracked every set. But the game was only a portion of the experience, not the end state. Lorcana had core players, but they looked and behaved differently than they might in another game.
